Building a Team – 4 Tips to Build Your Dream Team

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The great thing about being a leader is all the great people on our teams. Great teams just don’t happen magically, though. Building a team takes hard work and commitment, but there are some things you can do to make it easier. In the military, we very rarely had the same people on a team from beginning to end. People were always moving in and out or getting reassigned. We were

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One of the reasons we wanted to become leaders was so that we could take on challenges we couldn’t achieve by ourselves. Employee motivation is a challenge for every leader. So how do we get our team members to do things that need to be done without being told? This week we’re answering a question from Pete. He says, “One thing I’m dealing with right now is trying to motivate

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As we continue with our May theme of Courageous Leadership, this week Jason talks about the idea of intellectual honesty and how it is different from simply telling the truth. Intellectual honesty has a basis in problem solving but can be applied to make well-informed decisions in a variety of leadership situations. Striving to be intellectually honest helps us ensure that we have considered all factors when making a leadership

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Just like our homes can get cluttered as the year goes on, our teams can get cluttered with misplaced priorities, ineffective procedures and tasks that no longer serve a valuable purpose. While we should always be on the lookout for waste and activities that are no longer serving our purpose or helping us achieve our mission, planning a spring cleaning activity can help us get focused on making improvements without getting

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Now that we’ve recovered from the holidays and we’ve got a few weeks of 2016 under our belt, it’s time to start thinking about some ways that we can make our team stronger, better and faster over the coming year. One of the ways we can make these kind of improvements is through team building exercises. While these kinds of activities can take away from the time we have to

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One of the most important responsibilities we have as leaders is to develop other leaders who can someday take our place and grow to achieve their own successes. While it doesn’t usually come with increased pay or benefits, developing leaders on our team can be one of the most personally rewarding endeavors we can undertake. To effectively develop our team members into strong leaders we need to be genuinely and

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Authenticity in leadership and the workplace has gotten a lot of attention recently. Most of us would agree that being authentic is a highly desirable trait in our leaders, but it can be really difficult to understand what authenticity truly means and how to go about practicing it in our day-to-day activities leading others. A working definition of authenticity that I like to use is simply, “having your words and

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Nothing erodes trust like finding out someone was hiding something important from you. I don’t like to get political in these posts, but there are several recent examples where people in positions of trust and authority (both government and corporate) have been accused of withholding information that should have been available to the general public. This lack of transparency, whether real or perceived, is having a significant impact on the

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One of the topics I often discuss with my colleagues, mentors and the individuals that I coach is the role that younger people are taking in the workplace. Some of the folks I talk with have very strong opinions about these younger cohorts, especially Millennials. I don’t want to get into labelling certain groups of people (although I kind of already have), but despite opinions, the younger generations are entering

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Ethics in leadership seems to be a topic that comes up frequently. Unfortunately, the topic usually comes up when there has been a serious breach in ethics and a very senior individual has been removed from their position, or sometimes even ends up in jail. We often ask, “How did we get to the point where this happened?” Like many of the things we have discussed, you can help